News In Brief

So there was Shahrul Nizam Zainol, waiting in the labor room of a hospital in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with his wife, Tazira Wahid, when his cellphone rang. The caller: an on-air personality from a local radio station, offering a nice prize if Shahrul could correctly answer a question on his quiz show. You can see where this is going, right? Right. At that moment, as thousands of people around the city listened in, Tazira began delivering. In his excitement, Shahrul neglected to hang up. No word on whether he won the prize, but he did get an eight-pound son out of the deal.

Meanwhile, two sets of new parents in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain were so moved by last week's historic two-day national referendum on a new charter that would restore democracy by, among other things, allowing females to vote and seek elective office that they have named their baby daughters Mithaq. So what, you ask? Mithaq is the Arabic word for charter.

"Jobs, population growth, and relocation tend to go hand-in-hand," says Nat Workman, senior editor of Runzheimer Inter- national in analyzing requests for cost-of-living data in places where clients are transferring their key employees. A leading management consulting group, the Rochester, Wis.-based company found that of 26,000 such requests the most frequent were for metropolitan Chicago and for the state of California. Conspicuous by their absence: New York City and Washington, D.C. The top 10 in each category: